Monday, August 27, 2012

"Brief Candles"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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To-day was the first day of my third year at university.  As an English major, I have to take a class on Shakespeare, and one of the things my professor did was have us go around the room and say something personally significant about Shakespeare.  I commented on how far-flung allusions to him are.  As an example, I used the phrase "brief candle" from Macbeth.  Aldous Huxley took this phrase and titled a series of short stories Brief Candles.  Then, Chris White took that title and wrote a song called "Brief Candles" for Odessey and Oracle.  Rod Argent had quoted Shakespeare's The Tempest in the liner notes, and now here was this other, hidden Shakespeare reference.

So when that class was done, I decided to listen to "Brief Candles," because it had been awhile since I last listened to it.  But while listening to it, I thought the bass line sounded pretty easy to learn.  So I did.  And then I learned the rest of the guitar part.  (The audio posted above includes only the guitar and bass part, as that's all I have the opportunity to record at the moment.)

I was going to post this to my other tumblr account, where I keep my personal musical output, but I'd been thinking of creating a tumblr to track my progress of learning all of the Zombies' songs (and other related bands' songs, such as Argent and Colin Blunstone’s solo work).  So I decided finally to do it.

I've learned a handful of songs already, but I haven't recorded any official versions yet (and since I'm currently at university, it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon).  So I'm still very early on in this long project.